Many people have long utilized firearms to shoot projectiles of various sorts. For example, military personnel, law enforcement officers, hunters, and precision target shooters use different types of firearms (or weapons platforms) for different purposes. Usually, people use firearms, including long guns, in conjunction with an optical sight, or other visual augmentation devices (“VAD”), to assist them in observing, acquiring and or precisely aiming at a target. In most instances, VADs are mounted to a long gun and never removed, whereas in other instances, some use multiple VADs to allow for use during daylight hours, dark hours, and conditions of limited visibility. Some long gun users even go to great lengths in selecting an appropriate VAD to match a shooting condition and to provide helpful visual assistance to acquire an engage a target.
VADs are typically not suited and designed for many different shooting applications and/or environments. For example, some VADs may be for use in daylight hours while others are better suited for nighttime hours or observation thru visual obscurants (i.e. fog, rain, smoke, etc). Thus, some long gun users desire to utilize different VADs on the same firearm due to changes in the intended application, mission, reconnaissance or shooting environment.
Changing VADs on long guns poses not only skilled-technical challenges, but can also pose equipment adjustment and available tool challenges. For example, removing a daytime scope from a long gun and installing a nighttime scope may require a gunsmith or armorer and can take a considerable period of time—time that some long gun users can not afford to waste. Changing VADs can also possibly disturb a weapons point of impact or the calibration of the different VADs due to the installation and removal process.
Some manufactures have devised various mounting bracket devices to provide a platform for mounting different VADs. Typically, these mounting brackets are rigidly and permanently attached to the receiver or stock of a firearm and VADs can be attached or mounted to these brackets. With advancing technologies these existing mounting brackets can not accommodate supplemental or multiple VADs. Because of the rigid attachments of the mounting bracket, there is no current capability to rapidly attach and detach a mounting bracket to and from a weapon. Also, the rigid receiver and stock mounting process requires extensive amounts of precision gunsmithing and/or armorer support to install and maintain.
Several types of conventional mounting brackets that are rigidly attached to a weapons platform are now utilized. These include two rail systems: the McCann Industries Rail Systems (M.I.R.S. and S.I.R.S.) manufactured by McCann Industries in Spanaway, Wash. and the Modular Accessory Rail System (MARS) manufactured by Remington Arms Company, Inc.'s Military Products Division in Madison, N.C. While these accessory rail systems provide VAD mounts, these mounting brackets are not detachable and must be rigidly attached to a weapons platform. In addition, these conventional rail systems typically require professional gunsmith/armorer installation.
What is needed, therefore, is a simple to use and easy to install mounting bracket device that is easily attachable and detachable without professional assistance and that provides a secure mounting platform for one or more VADs without the use of tools. It is to the provision of such detachable mounting brackets that the embodiments of the present invention are directed.